For decades, causal inference methods have found wide applicability in the social and biomedical sciences. As computing systems start intervening in our work and daily lives, questions of cause-and-effect are gaining importance in computer science as well. To enable widespread use of causal inference, we…
The Microsoft Research PhD Scholarship Program in EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) was launched in 2004 by Microsoft Research Cambridge, United Kingdom and has so far supported more than 200 PhD students from more than 18 countries and 51 institutions. The online submission tool for…
To help academics advance their research, Microsoft has supported hundreds of fellows through the Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship. This year we are expanding our funding support by creating two new fellowships: one designed to support diverse talent earning advanced degrees in computing-related fields, and one…
France’s victory over Croatia in the 2018 FIFA World Cup was as thrilling as sports competition gets. If you’re as much a fan of the game as I am, you enjoyed watching 32 national teams vie for the title over a beautiful month across 11…
Beautiful summer weather, ice cold Pimm’s and the idyllic scenery along the River Cam greeted over 100 PhD students from across the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) region who had traveled to Cambridge, England, to share and learn about artificial intelligence with tech visionaries…
ACM – the Association for Computing Machinery – has created a new major award to honor 2009 A.M. Turing Laureate Charles P. “Chuck” Thacker. The award honors Thacker’s pioneering contributions to computing, considered by the community to have propelled the world in the early 1970s…
We live in the age of the intelligent edge and intelligent cloud. Data is collected at the edge using billions of small devices. The data is pre-processed at the edge and shipped in a filtered and aggregated form to the cloud. In the cloud, the…
Over the past decade, machine learning systems have begun to play a key role in many high-stakes decisions: Who is interviewed for a job? Who is approved for a bank loan? Who receives parole? Who is admitted to a school? Human decision makers are susceptible…
Today, fresh out of the Microsoft Research Montreal lab, comes an open-source project called TextWorld. TextWorld is an extensible Python framework for generating text-based games. Reinforcement learning researchers can use TextWorld to train and test AI agents in skills such as language understanding, affordance extraction,…
Adam Troy had an idea. He was spending so much time searching through old emails and attachments to prepare for meetings: Could AI help him be better prepared for meetings? Could machine learning automatically identify the most relevant emails and documents he needed for his…
People with dyslexia perceive the world in different ways when it comes to the arrangement of letters and words on paper – or, these days, on web pages. Indeed, so much of modern life and accessibility to the information that enables us to participate in…
Traditionally, machine learning based approaches to information retrieval have taken the form of supervised learning-to-rank models. Recent advances in other machine learning approaches—such as adversarial learning and reinforcement learning—should find interesting new applications in future retrieval systems. At Microsoft AI & Research, we have been…
